Zombie reports fuel drug frenzy, again

After ‘bath salts’ were said to be behind a cannibalism case in the U.S., politicians jumped on the criminalization bandwagon

As a message of vital public importance, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention wants you to know that there is no zombie apocalypse. Seriously.

I know, it sounds like a headline from the satirical newsmagazine The Onion — and I had to check repeatedly to ensure it wasn’t an Onion story. But it is apparently legitimate, given that CDC spokesman David Daigle recently emailed the Huffington Post stating, “CDC does not know of a virus or condition that would reanimate the dead (or one that would present zombielike symptoms).”

The CDC’s necromantic turn is, of course, the result of a number of high-profile “zombie” cases, and in particular the case of Rudy Eugene, who was shot dead by Miami police after attacking and cannibalizing Ronald Poppo.

According to some reports, Eugene continued eating Poppo’s face even after being shot, which gave rise to the zombie rumours. And according to a Miami police officer — not a toxicology report, but a cop, and one who wasn’t even involved in the case — Eugene looked like he might have been on the designer drug known as “bath salts.”

That was enough for the credulous media, as they dutifully reported the alleged bath salts connection — and, better yet, quickly found dozens of cases of zombie cannibals. Indeed, “zombie apocalypse” became one of the highest trending items on Google, with a Google.com search of “bath salts” and “zombies” still returns more than five million hits.

So one can understand why the CDC felt the need to set the record straight. And as a report from the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse (CCSA) and the Canadian Community Epidemiology Network on Drug Use details, the record on bath salts is one that will surely disappoint aspiring necromancers.

The report, which mercifully avoids mentioning zombies, notes that bath salts are amphetamine-like synthetic stimulants sold in “head shops” and over the Internet. More specifically, bath salts typically contain methylenedioxypyrovalerone (MDPV), methylone or mephedrone, synthetic cathinones “similar to naturally occurring cathinones found in the Khat plant, a shrub native to the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula.”

Furthermore, “Individuals under the influence of these substances report hallucinations, paranoia, chest pain and blurry vision and appear agitated and combative.” Not exactly a day at the beach, to be sure, but not exactly the equivalent of raising the dead either.

Nonetheless, now that the zombie reports have reached epidemic proportions, it’s unlikely some journalists will let any pesky facts get in the way of sensational stories. After all, we’ve been here before, and the facts didn’t matter then.

That’s right, we’ve tangled with zombies before. In fact, just seven years ago, when “meth mania” was at its peak, the infamous Newsweek cover story, “America’s Most Dangerous Drug,” detailed how people became “zombies” while under the influence of the dark crystal.

Before that there were ecstasy zombies and crack (cocaine) zombies and LSD zombies and, most famous of all thanks to movies like Reefer Madness, marijuana zombies. Charging that a drug turns people into zombies is therefore the rule rather than the exception.

In fact, everything about the reporting on bath salts follows the rules — that is, conforms to the tried-and-true methodology for producing drug panics. That methodology, discussed by Philip Jenkins in his book Synthetic Panics: The Symbolic Politics of Designer Drugs, begins with reports of harrowing claims made by authorities, usually law enforcement officials — much like the Miami police officer who suggested Rudy Eugene was on bath salts.

The putative problem is then typically framed using a variety of rhetorical devices, including characterizing the drug as a “rape drug” or the “serial killer of drugs,” and users as “zombies.”

And since the audience is already somewhat inured to such rhetoric, having heard it many times before, the media will often present the newest threat as worse than anything that’s gone before — as in a recent CNN story, in which bath salts are described as “PCP on crack.”

Usage is also invariably described as “epidemic,” a metaphor that, Jenkins explains, presents the substance as a health menace comparable to an infectious disease. And the use of the word “epidemic” does not in any way depend on usage rates — for example, a Google News search of “bath salts” and “epidemic” returns thousands of results, despite limited use of the drug in the U.S., and, according to the CCSA, only 14 confirmed cases reported to Canadian health authorities, all in Nova Scotia.

Nevertheless, sensationalized media reports inevitably lead to the criminalization of drugs, even when politicians are utterly ignorant of the drug, as they were of cannabis when it was criminalized in 1923, and as they are of bath salts now.

Sure enough, the feds announced this week that MDPV will be criminalized this fall. (Mephedrone and methylone are already illegal, as they are deemed to be similar to amphetamine.)

Now of course one can make a strong argument that criminalization merely exacerbates, or even creates, drug problems. But as Erich Goode and Nachman Ben-Yehuda explain in Moral Panics: The Social Construction of Deviance, criminalization also allows politicians to appear tough on crime and to look like they care about social ills, while really doing very little.

Indeed, it will require a lot more than criminalizing a drug to solve the problems that led Rudy Eugene to nearly kill a man, and that led homeless man Ronald Poppo to become an easy target. But unlike making new laws, such problems aren’t solved with the stroke of a pen.

Furthermore, many commentators have noted that such panics present us with a distorted picture of the dangers of various drugs, and hence lead to improper policy responses. While bath salts will soon become a Schedule I (most serious) drug in the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, just as methamphetamine became a Schedule I during the meth hysteria of 2005, we still largely ignore the most dangerous drug of all: alcohol.

The dangers of alcohol are well documented. In a 2007 Lancet report, for example, British psychopharmacologist David Nutt and other experts ranked 20 psychoactive drugs according to 16 criteria. Alcohol came out on top, followed by heroin and crack cocaine, while khat, with its naturally occurring cathinones, placed a lowly 15th.

In a 2007 report titled Comparing the Perceived Seriousness and Actual Costs of Substance Abuse in Canada, the CCSA also stressed the comparative damage done by alcohol, emphasizing that the “direct social and economic costs associated with alcohol ($7.4 billion) were more than twice the costs associated with illicit drugs ($3.6 billion.)”

Given our punitive approach to “demon” drugs, one would expect politicians to make alcohol a Schedule I drug, tout de suite. But that would really put a damper on state dinners, and besides, there are no stories about alcohol zombies — or at least there haven’t been since Prohibition.

But zombies abound, nonetheless. Just listen to some in the media drone on about face-eating cannibals and watch politicians sleepwalk their way through criminalizing yet another drug, and notice who the real zombies are.

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